Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to sharing of data over a network. In particular, the present invention is directed to synchronization of a folder and its contents shared between multiple clients.
Description of Related Art
People often use multiple computers on a regular basis. A typical user may have a first computer at the office and a second computer at home, for example. Sharing documents between these multiple computers generally requires transferring the document from one to the other—for example, a user may e-mail himself a copy of a document he is working on before leaving the office, so that he can resume working on it later from home. If the user forgets to e-mail or bring the document home with him, he must either go back to the office to retrieve it, or perhaps give up until the morning. Some methods exist to allow remote access to a computer, for example using a virtual private network (VPN) to access a corporate network from a remote location. However, if the user is accessing the document remotely and loses his connection, he may lose his changes, be unable to continue, and may end up with a corrupted document.
In addition, a dramatic increase in telecommuting and decrease in business travel has led to the need for people to collaborate on files from locations remote from each other. This results in the passing of documents back and forth, for example as e-mail attachments or through instant messaging file transfers. Not only is attaching files cumbersome for many computer users, but where multiple iterations are involved, it is not difficult to end up with multiple versions of the same document, perhaps having the same or a similar file name, located in various places on a user's hard drive. Worse still, two or more people may be editing local versions of a document on their own computers, resulting in multiple different current versions of a document than then have to be painstakingly integrated to produce a usable version.